iTunes Radio Playlist

I was listening to MacBreak Weekly tonight and one of the hosts, Alex Lindsay, was asking if there was any way to create a radio like playlist. I wasn’t sure why he would want to do such a thing but he went on to explain how most radio stations use this type of playlist to decide what should be played next on the radio.

With the charge placed I decided to see if I could make such a playlist. I am not sure if I got it exactly correct, but I think I got it close.

Step 1: Decide the number of songs you want in your final playlist. For my example I wanted 10.
Step 2: Decide the categories. I went with Hot, Fade, and Classic.
Step 3: Create a normal playlist for each category and add the songs into those categories. My categories looked like this:

Step 4: You will need to create wrapper smart playlists for each category playlist. Hot_filter, Fade_filter, Classic_filter. This is where half of the magic occurs. Your rules should be the following:
-Match the following rule: Playlist is xxxx, where xxxx is which ever filter you are defining.
-Limt to 1, 2, 7 items for Hot_filter, Fade_filter, and Classic_filter respectfully
-Live updating
-I set mine to selected by “random” but I would imagine if you played with this option you could get better results. For instance if you had random for classics, but least recently played for hot.

Step 5: Now you should have 6 new playlists, 3 category, and 3 filter. Now you can make your Radio_edit playlist. This should also be a smart playlist and the filters shoudl look like this:
-Maty ANY of the following rules
– then add a Playlist is xxxx rule for each filter playlist
-set no limit because the limiting is done by the filters.
-check live updating

Step 6: You should have a radio edit. I am not sure if it will do exactly what Alex was asking for but it is closer than just defining categories and randomly selecting a song from those playlists. Atleast now your odds are greater to get a song from the hot than from the fade than from the not.

Anyways, I just wanted to post that little piece of playlist fun I came up with incase any on was looking for a way to do it.